Castalia

The true blood

Dear Friends,

Having written lately of hungry ghosts and of the movement between houses — from the house of fear to that of love — I find I have more to tell you of my friend from Ruritania; I can now tell you of his encounter with a vampire.

He was living then on that great mound which overlooks Harlem, which rises up as one follows Broadway beyond ninety-sixth. The Heights were not enough for him; they were, after all, not Mount Helicon, not the muses’ abode, but the abode of NGOs, the place where the gospel had become the social gospel — where Christ would return, not in the clouds, but in enlightened social policy.

If one longed for something more, something beyond the social, one might perhaps venture down.